On When vs. Where

Thanks to Harold Ship, I came across a post by Bill Lee entitled "Investing in 2013: It's about time not location".  Lee claims that while there have been much traction around location based solutions,  the location by itself has less value that the time of occurrence of past or future events.  In the figure above, it might be more interesting WHEN Achilles is going to bypass the tortoise than where it is going to happen.  Saying that a traffic congestion is going to occur at a certain location might be meaningless without prediction about the timing of the traffic congestion.   It is more valuable to know when the delayed aircraft is going to land than just to know where it is now, it is more valuable to know when the technician is expected to arrive than just to know where he is now.  I don't really care where the guy who delivers my pizza is now, but I definitely want to know when he is going to arrive.   Lee claims that in the USA alone businesses lose $90 Billion annually due to people running late, whether it is the employee, or the technician for whom the employee waits at home.   The claim is that time-based services is a good topic for 2013 investors to pursue, whether location is involved (spatiotemporal capabilities) or not.   As the timing of these time-based services is associated with current or predicted events,  event processing is a key for such services.  I'll write more on time-based services later.

Recent paper about spatiotemporal event processing

Recently we see more work on spatiotemporal event processing.  I came across a recent paper, authored by

Foued Barnouni and Bernard Moulin from Laval University which deals with spatiotemporal event patterns. 

The generic form of a spatiotemporal pattern is shown in the figure below,  first the temporal relation is evaluated and then the spatial relation, where the spatial patterns can be of three types: distance, topology and direction.  The model also supports qualitative pattern such as "far", "near",  "very near"  enables the definition of fuzzy qualifiers in a pattern.   The paper provides good overview of the spatiotemporal event processing topic, as well as a specific model implemented by a combination of TreeSap, a qualitative reasoning GIS system,  and the event processing part is implemented in Esper. 

From Australia - 2013: The Year of the Internet of Things

The complexevents site by David Luckham has undergone a face-lifting and has a nice new format.

In its current feature article it links to an article from CSIRO, Australia,  entitled: "2013: The Year of the Internet of Things".   Arkady Zaslavsky from CSIRO, who deals for years in context aware computing points out several successful IoT projects in Australia -- one of them is in agriculture, using sensors to check the best conditions for certain plants, other examples are public transportation track in big cities and monitoring sporting performance.   The illustration above taken from this article compares 2010 and (predicted) 2015 quantities of  Internet data in petabytes (petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) by industries, where in 2010 most data was created by humans, and the shift is that most data on the Internet will be created by sensors.      

The potential dark side of the Internet of Things

Thanks to Rainer von Ammon who attracted my attention to an article entitled "Murder by Internet",  that points out some of the dangers of connecting everything to the Internet,  some of them such as manipulating pacemakers and controlling vehicles from remote may result in using the Internet for murder, and commit various crimes that will be difficult to detect.   Security of such systems will become crucial!  Event processing can also be used as enabling technology for such security, but cyber crimes pose challenges that law enforcement today is not ready to handle.  

The Internet of Things in practice

I came across a post in the "smarter planet blog" entitled "The Internet of Things start to bear fruits" by Paul Brody,  it claims that the "Internet of Things" vision is beginning to be in reality, and that the major enabling factor is the availability of low cost scalable connectivity.  The data transfer cost is below $1 for GB.  

It surveys some initiatives like: Raspberry Pi, Sensordone, and the Nokia initiative to become the "where company".

Event processing is one of the ingredients of the Internet of Things, and on this space,  Brody mentions IFTTT (If this than that).  Note that I have written recently about ON{X} which is of similar flavor to IFTTT.

S4 vs. Storm

Yesterday I wrote about a talk given by a person from Yahoo Labs!  Another piece from Yahoo Labs! is a comparison between S4 (the author participated in the development of S4)  and Storm   acquired by Twitter.    Interesting!   Note that S4 and Storm are not the only players in the area of distributed stream processing, there are some others like IBM Infosphere Streams, so a more comprehensive survey should not be limited to these two. 

An event-driven approach for the separation of concerns

Today we hosted Hayim Makabee from Yahoo! Labs who gave a talked entitled "An event-driven approach for the separation of concerns".  In the talk Hayim discussed his approach to implement separation of concerns through event-driven programming, and contrasted it with aspect oriented programming.

The talk can be found on slideshare.   Interesting.

Note that I have written a few times about the relationship between event processing and separation of concerns, in the context of contexts, and in the context of  using SQL for event processing.